Amid a nationwide teacher shortage, school districts across Cape Cod are feeling the pinch of vacancies — but in sometimes surprising areas.
“We definitely have enough staff to safely start the school year, and provide an excellent education for our students,” Michelle Dunn, a fifth-grade teacher and president of the Dennis-Yarmouth Educators Association, said in an email. “However, we do still have a number of vacancies in DY, especially in hard to fill areas such as EL (English Learning).”
There are several openings in the Dennis-Yarmouth school district as the first week of school wraps up, the vast majority are for paraprofessionals, long-term and on-call substitute teachers, speech and language pathologists, special education assistants and after-school day care aides.
Paraprofessionals — sometimes referred to as paraeducators, personal care assistants, teacher’s assistants or teacher’s aides — provide specialized one-on-one support in the classroom, according to the Education Support Professionals website through the Massachusetts Teachers Association.
Paraprofessionals, classroom assistants, substitute teachers and specialized educators for subjects like special education or English as a second language are in high demand and short supply on the Cape.
In the Sandwich school district, consisting of four schools totaling 2,288 students from pre-K to grade 12 according to the Massachusetts Department of Education, there are 11 cross-district openings, according to the district’s job listings website. Four of those listings are educational support professionals. One is a speech and language pathologist, two are special education van drivers and one district-wide call for substitute teachers.
There are 28 job openings in the Falmouth school district, which includes seven schools of 3,044 students from pre-K to grade 12. Nineteen of those 28 openings are for support or substitute positions.
Monomoy Regional School District, which consists of 1,763 students in four schools spanning pre-K through grade 12, is looking to fill nine positions, seven of which are long-term substitutes and special education instructional assistants.
Despite the vacancies in the Dennis-Yarmouth school district, Superintendent Carol Woodbury said the district is overall in good shape.
“The place we need people is what we call related services, so things like speech therapy or paraeducators,” Woodbury said. “We’re down a few paraeducators, maybe a handful, but it’s not too bad compared to the rest of the country.”
At Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School, two or three paraeducators were still needed days before they opened their doors for the year, Principal Paul Funk said.
“They’re a crucial part of the school, and we need them,” Funk said of the high school’s paraprofessionals. “We’re making it work, but if we could hire a couple more, it would solidify the building.”
According to the 2021-2024 collective bargaining agreement between the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional Secretaries and Assistants Association, the union that represents paraeducators in the district, the hourly wage for a paraeducator in Dennis-Yarmouth schools ranges from $16.88 to $33.45 for the 2022-2023 school year.
Sara Ahern, starting her first year as superintendent of Barnstable Public Schools, the Cape’s largest school district, said the district still needs support positions.
“We are beginning the year in a good position, having hired 59 excellent new educators,” Ahern said in an email.
The district is experiencing some vacancies, like most area districts, she said. “Our vacancies tend to be for paraprofessionals and in some highly specialized positions like speech and language pathologists or school psychologists. We are also always looking to recruit substitutes and bus drivers.”
According to the district’s job openings page, there are still 51 positions to be filled across Barnstable’s nine schools, most of them roles such as personal care assistant, speech and language pathologist, English Language Learning teachers, long-term substitutes and day care aides.
In Barnstable, paraprofessionals make anywhere from $18.27 to $30.22 per hour, according to the Barnstable Teachers Association 2022 paraprofessional salary table.
Gerry Goyette, interim superintendent of the Provincetown school system, which includes 165 students from an infant and toddler program to grade 8, said the district is in good shape for all types of educators, but is mainly in need of substitutes.
“We’re just short one foreign language teacher, which, ask any school system if they have enough foreign language teachers and they’ll say nope, still looking,” Goyette said. “We may need a paraprofessional for the infant and toddler program, but that’s still a maybe.”
In Provincetown, most substitutes are the parents of current students, or retired community members, which can make balancing their schedule with the school’s need tricky, Goyette said.
Often, the schools will pull paraeducators from the classroom to be a substitute if there is no other option.
“It’s Provincetown, everyone here pulls their weight,” Goyette said. “The teachers are really good about saying, OK, I don’t need this person all day today, so they can cover a class if they need to.”
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For Dennis-Yarmouth schools, Woodbury said, the principals work with their building’s schedule, placing support roles where they are needed throughout the day.
“Classroom positions are pretty well covered,” she said. “If somebody needs a paraeducator in the morning but not the afternoon, administration will try to fine-tune it with the schedule.”
At the high school, Funk said teachers pitch in where they can and do their best to make it work, covering where there is a need.
Funk said the high school is entering the new year in need of a French teacher and special education teacher, a unique situation for the school.
As the district continues the search to fill those two spots, luckily one of the science teachers at the school is certified to teach French, Funk said, and has agreed to fill in until a permanent replacement is found.
“I think our staff at DY are fantastic, they work really hard and are more than willing to adapt to these changes,” he said.
In a housing market as expensive and unpredictable as Cape Cod’s, it can be impossible for educators, especially those early in their careers, to find an affordable place to live.
“If we’re looking at the big picture, it’s housing,” Funk said. “When you interview someone, they need to have a place to live, and that’s been a problem on the Cape with affordable housing.”
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That housing plays a role in filling jobs.
“When educators just graduate from college, they’re not at top of pay scale, which can be hard down here,” Woodbury said. “Because of that, people who might have interviewed with us could go to another district who can pay more. Competition is a little stiffer down here.”
According to the state Department of Education, based on enrollment data from the 2019-2020 school year, the average salary of a teacher in the Dennis-Yarmouth district was approximately $82,000. The figure does not account, however, for the lower salaries teachers early in their career receive.
Ahern also said the lack of affordable housing seems to be one of the largest challenges in recruiting educators to Cape Cod.
For classroom teachers in Barnstable, the average salary is $82,619, according to 2019-2020 enrollment data from the state Department of Education. Like in the Dennis-Yarmouth school district, this figure does not reflect the lower salary teachers early in or just starting their career earn.
Housing is a challenge in recruiting teachers for the Provincetown district as well, according to Goyette.
“It’s definitely a concern when you have an opening, and you have applicants. One of the first questions is ‘Have you secured housing,'” he said. “There’s no point in interviewing and getting your hopes up if they don’t have housing.”
Woodbury said another reason support positions can be hard to fill is before the pandemic, they were a favorite job for mostly stay-at-home moms who could both return to the workforce part time, and sync up their schedule to their child’s.
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After the pandemic, however, with expanded work-from-home options in virtually every career path, Woodbury said, they aren’t seeing as many applicants from that demographic as they used to.
“It’s hard to remember since the pandemic changed so much for schools, but I’d say we have slightly more vacancies (in support positions) this year,” she said. “But we’re in fairly good shape.”
Sarah Carlon can be reached at: scarlon@capecodonline.com or on Twitter: @sarcarlon
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